I sort of love the “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” posters that have become the darling of interior decorating bloggers and graphic design jokesters alike in the past few years. I even have one of the posters hanging in my apartment. Then I saw Merlin’s version.

At first I LOLed, and then I was like “huh.” How did we get here? How did this meme evolve from stoic World War II propaganda to hilarious Richard Dawkins jokes?

And thus, the phylogenetic tree of “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” posters was born:

What stands out to me from this is that, as in evolutionary biology, sometimes the earlier well-evolved forms (in this case the original poster, which obviously had a lot of throught go into it) are often much more elegant and beautiful than later random mutations.